Jay Solomon, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, said on Monday that Barack Obama let his “red line” in Syria be crossed because Iran told him that if Assad was bombed, they would back out of the nuclear negotiations.

Appearing on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Mitchell noted that Solomon, the author of the new book “The Iran Wars,” was “reporting new information about the red line that the president decided not to enforce basically against Syria after the chemical weapons attacks… Exactly three years ago, it was Labor Day weekend when he did not take military action. [Obama] had a lot of reasons he said at the time and Secretary Kerry said that the Russians helped us get rid of the chemical stockpiles so there was no need for military action but the bottom line is… there was also an Iranian component.”

“Yeah, to write this book, I went back to a number of areas, this money or the red line that wasn’t enforced to try to get more information and if you go back in time, when the president announced his plans to attack and then pull back, it was exactly the period in time where American negotiators were meeting with Iranian negotiators secretly in Oman to get the nuclear agreement,” Solomon said.